Portland's mayor may or may not know tech, but he certainly knows how to play to his audience -- and in his keynote address to OSCON this morning, Sam Adams plied attendees again and again with tales of his city's libations.

"I welcome you all to move your businesses to Portland," the mayor declared. "I'll buy you a beer."

The city's brews came up more than a dozen times during Adams' brief keynote, almost as often as the subject of his talk -- open source in government.

Beer is near and dear to the open source community, though, and his remarks were well received. The mayor also plugged Portland's commitment to open source in government, touting technology as a tool to interact and collaborate with citizens, a theme of this year's conference.

"Government needs to learn to trust the people," Adams said, and can do that by engaging them in new initiatives and by sharing information online.

That was the objective of Portland's CivicApps contest, which aimed to recruit developers to format city data for consumption and use online. The contest drew only 17 submissions, but its awards ceremony attracted Tim O'Reilly, who held it up as an example of good open source governance in his opening keynote Wednesday.

Adams' talk was generally, though not universally, well received on Twitter. In person, his laugh lines got laughs ("Just for you, you do not have to pay sales tax while you're here") and he won warm applause -- particularly when praising his city.

Sounded to me (and a few others) like the mayor repeatedly mispronounced "DIY" (do-it-yourself) as "DYI", but who am I to talk? If misusing catch phrases were a crime, I'd be in jail.

At the end of this morning's keynotes, conference chairwoman Allison Randal confirmed what Travel Portland announced Monday, that OSCON will be back next year.

And Adams made the most of his opportunity to encourage open source developers to return and again to a city where "people question assumptions and work collaboratively."

"Unlike a lot of other places that have great talent," the mayor said, "We're actually a place people want to live. And not just because of our beer."